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THE SCREEN; The Breaking Point

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At the beginning of the film called "Tension," which came to the Rialto yesterday, a fellow, introduced as a detective, addresses the audience privately. He says that the job of a detective is mainly one of finding out the strong and weak sides of people suspected of crimes and then applying tension thereto. "Everybody," he tells the audience, "has got a breaking point. And when they've been stretched so tight they can't take it any more"—He demonstrates by snapping a rubber band.In a manner of speaking, this picture, produced by M-G-M, is a test of the gentleman's thesis, for it makes a most grueling assault, in a long and exhausting exhibition, upon the audience's breaking point. But we can't rightly say that the pressure is of a notably tensile sort. In telling about the involvements of a young druggist whose wife runs away with an obviously shady character, who along about the middle of the picture, gets killed, it rambles from one thing to another in a most unsuspenseful way and ends with a shattering revelation which you can see coming a half-hour in advance. And in this demonstration, a capable cast plays roles which require that resemblance to people—human people—be distinctly eschewed.A much better title for this picture would be "Patience," presuming such a thing. As for our own reaction, we felt like that rubber band.